What
David Irving made of the diary entry for March 27,
1942 in his biography, "Goebbels. Mastermind of the
Third Reich".

As
he argued in court, it was necessary to deal with
it more fully in the Goebbels biography than in
Hitler's War because while the passage was
clearly evidence against Goebbels himself, it was
not evidence against Hitler to the same degree. --
Readers of these pages may well ponder on what
permitted the British High Court despite these two
works to describe the author in April 2000 as a
"Holocaust denier".

AS the Soviet partisans intensified their deadly
war that spring the security service (S.D.)
reported that the culprits were the political
commissars and the Jews. 'It has therefore proved
necessary once again,' dictated Goebbels, 'to shoot
more Jews... Any sentimentalism,' he continued,
referring to a quality that did not abound in his
heart, 'is out of place.'[1]

By now the two-month railroad log-jam was over
and another train was being loaded with Jews marked
for deportation. What might be their fate? On March
27, the day before this trainload left Berlin,
Goebbels dictated an extraordinary, deadpan but
spine-chilling entry into his diary which confirmed
that he at least was now in little
doubt.

Beginning with Lublin the Jews are now
being deported eastward from the
Government-General [former Poland]. The
procedure is pretty barbaric, and one that
beggars description, and there's not much left
of the Jews. Broadly speaking one can probably
say that sixty percent of them will have to be
liquidated, while only forty percent can be put
to work.

'The former gauleiter of Vienna,' he continued,
referring to S.S. Brigadeführer Odilo
Globocnik, S.S. and police chief of the Lublin
District
[right], 'who
is carrying out this operation, is doing so pretty
discreetly and also using a procedure that is not
too blatant.'[2]

Goebbels added that the Jews had had it coming
to them for a long time; he cited yet again
Hitler's prophecy of 1939
[below], and
the need to eschew all mawkish sentimentality.
'It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan
race and the Jewish bacillus,' he concluded,
unconsciously adopting Hitler's favourite analogy.
'Here too,' he dictated to his poker-faced
stenographer, 'the Führer is the staunch
champion and promoter of a radical
solution.'[3]

Nowhere
do the diary's seventy thousand pages refer to an
explicit order by Hitler for the murder of the
Jews. (Perhaps this is not surprising, but for the
sake of completeness it needs saying.) Goebbels
instinctively couched every phrase of those diaries
with both cunning and ambiguity.

The documents clearly show Hitler as the
uncompromising architect of the plan to shunt all
Europe's Jews out, failing Madagascar, to the east.
The Polish ghettos emptied by this process would be
replenished with Jews deported from the Reich. 'The
Jews,' wrote Goebbels, 'have nothing to laugh
about.'[4] They were
having to pay dearly for the misdeeds of their
brethren in Britain and America: such was his
rationale. On March 28 he stipulated that they were
no longer to be listed in telephone
directories.[5] Why
should they be? They were disappearing from the
face of occupied Europe.

Source
notes

Diary, Mar 16, 1942, p.5.

See Globocnik to Himmler, top secret, Jun 3
(NA film T175, roll 122, 7904) on anti-Jewish
operations in Lublin; and Brack to Himmler, Jun
23, 1942 (ND: NO-205), reporting that on
Bouhler's instructions
[Bouhler, photo
right] he had made men available for
'special duties' and that pursuant to a further
request from Globocnik he had detached still
more men to the task. 'Brigadeführer
Globocnik holds the view that the entire
Jew-Aktion should be executed as fast as
humanly possible in case it runs into a snag
half-way through.' Brack himself argued for
keeping back two or three million able-bodied
Jews from the ten millions involved. -- On
Globocnik's relationship with Eichmann see
Wisliceny (IfZ, F71/8).

Diary, Mar 27, 1942, pp.19-22 (BA file
NL.118/42) There is no doubt as to these pages'
authenticity: the originals are in the Hoover
archives' Goebbels collection; the microfilm of
them (now NA film T84, roll 261) was made in New
York in 1947, and the author also checked the
microfiche copy made by the Nazis in 1944, in
the Moscow archives where the microfiches have
languished since 1945.

Ibid.

Tiessler, note dated Mar 28, 1942 (NA film
T81, roll 676, 5707)

Note: From
the all-important sentence referring explicitly
to "liquidated", conformist translators like
Prof Richard ("Skunky") Evans like to leave out
the word wohl (line 5) which means
"perhaps" or
"probably", no
doubt because it tends to bring out that
Goebbels is speculating, and does not know for
certain.